FLASH Renner Eyes Only.
Motie presence confirmed. Communications, translator, critical. Locator on. Contact Barthes. All Due Haste. Quinn.
Lord Blaine himself called the emergency session, pulling in his Motie-raised daughter, every available Mediator, and the linguistic team in charge of the Motie Alexandria Library. They worked late into the night. The questions were simple: Who or what should they send, and how?
“Focus on the who and what,” instructed Blaine. “I’ll worry about the how.”
Renner’s head and shoulders, floating holographically at the end of the conference table, was even more succinct. “Focus on the what,” he said. “You work out the details. Meanwhile, I want Ali Baba here, now.”
Glenda Ruth opened her mouth to interject. Lord Blaine waved her down. “His ship, his ward.”
Ali Baba was impassive. “As you say, Sir Kevin,” and rose to prepare for departure. Inwardly, Ali Baba’s heart was on fire. Outwardly, he showed only mannered calm. The meeting wore on.
House of Sargon, Mesolimeris
“Enheduanna says that you can Speak. Enheduanna reports that you may be an Accountant.” Unfortunately, these words were not spoken in any language that Asach could understand. Sargon regarded the pair without emotion. It was regrettable that the manna-eyed one had been separated from its red, four-legged Porter. But Sargon had given orders that it be brought unharmed, and that was proving to be problematic. The thing fought like a Warrior, ran like a Runner, and had the senses of a Farmer. It has struck out with its forefeet, and a young, inexperienced Warrior had accidentally severed its restraints. Short of killing it, they could not catch it. It had disappeared into the wastes.
Asach was an anthropologist, not a xenobiologist, and certainly not an expert on Moties. But these were clearly social animals, and in all social colonies ever known, only three rules of organization applied: schools, swarms, and hierarchy. Indeed, the closer one looked at the former two, the more they broke down into the latter. These were clearly sentient beings, and apparently hierarchical, so in some fashion status was important. The great unknowns were: how do you get it, and how do you show it? Anything from give it all away to keep it all for yourself; from hide it if you’ve got it to if you’ve got it, flaunt it applied in human societies.
Go with what you know, thought Asach. “I am Amari Selkirk Alidade Clarke Hathaway Quinn, Second Jackson Commission Representative of the Empire of Man. This is Laurel Courter, Seer and Defender of the Church of Him in New Utah. While we appreciate your escort and hospitality, we must inform you that we require food and water. Khkhkh! [drip]!”
Then aside to Laurel, “Tell anyone that and I will kill you and your entire island. I mean it. I won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”
Laurel looked supremely puzzled. “Tell them what? Your name?”
“My position.”
Laurel looked confused. “I don’t know what all that is. But everyone already knows you’re an offworlder.”
Asach saw another opportunity, and snapped “Hold!” in perfect Mesolimeran. Thankfully, Laurel fell into silence.
Sargon was impressed. There was no record of any human ever having learned a single word of Mesolimeran. Sargon gestured to someone unseen to comply with the request, then assumed a pose of formal introduction. Mentally, Sargon reviewed a Keeper’s tale to find the right verse, and then, with formal gesture, in perfect, MP-accented Middle Anglic, said, “Get the fuck outa my fields, fuzzball [rifle report]!”
Well, it’s a start, thought Asach.
Laurel fainted.
Odd, thought the Master. It’s from the tale of my line’s arrival in Mesolimeris. I thought that was a nice touch.
The water arrived a few awkward moments later. Sargon considered the options. To know the enemy mind required communication. To know the enemy body required experimentation. The two were not mutually exclusive. The Doctors could wait, Sargon decided. The order was Spoken.
“Send for Lagash.” A blur left the room, like a play of light on the edge of perception.
While they waited, Asach attempted to revive Laurel. There were few comfort options, save a splash of water about the face; propping her feet on the lower step—as it happened, at Sargon’s feet— for a bit of elevation. With a flourish, Asach re-covered her with the cloak.
Sargon got the message, and barked at Enheduanna, who barked in turn to beings unseen. The room was a flurry of activity shortly thereafter. Several Porters arrived bearing large blocks of baked clay. Another arrived carrying a ceramic container filled with silty mud, accompanied by a mirror-and-lens team. Asach watched, fascinated, as they constructed in short order two contoured benches by laying out blocks, then annealing mud to the top surface. One of the Miners went from Asach, to Laurel, to Asach again, and with a combination of pantomime and manhandling tested the curvature of their spines, hips, and heads.
When complete, one of the Porters scooped Laurel from the ground and deposited her gently on one of the benches. She sank into it as if on a featherbed, her head, shoulders, hips, and knees perfectly cradled. The bench was still warm from the baking process. It radiated heat, and Laurel’s shivering finally ended. She dropped immediately into deep, impenetrable sleep.
Asach ran a hand over the second bench, expecting a rough, dusty surface. Instead, it had the silky feel of soapstone, or polished wood: not slick like tile or glass, but warm like burnished pottery. Which was, Asach thought, essentially what it was. However, while Sargon stood, Asach did as well, in a stance of patient waiting, which the others seemed to find inoffensive. The furnishings team departed. The sun moved across the room, its rays warming the couch bases from every direction. Clearly the dome shape; the windows; the couches themselves had been situated to catch the warmth and light. Asach drank. The Moties chittered.
Then, Asach heard absolute silence, but felt an eldritch noise, like a disturbance in the very bones. Like jump shock, but without the disordered mind. Like grease sliding beneath the skin. Sargon stepped aside, and another framed the doorway. Its hair coat was beyond white— it shimmered platinum, even in the yellow sunlight. It was stooped, and its gripping hand rested heavily on the shoulder of the younger, smaller Enheduanna. The greasy feeling became prickly. Asach resisted the temptation to brush away a thousand centipedes. Laurel groaned and turned on the couch, but did not rise.
The feeling stopped abruptly. It said, “Halo,” in a booming voice.
Asach nearly dropped in surprise; recovered; answered. “Hello. I am Asach Quinn. This is Laurel Courter.”
The creepy feeling resumed briefly, then faded. “Halo,” it said again, “Mipela nem Tokkipa. Yu nem wanem?”
Asach felt dizzy. Of all the things on all the worlds possible on that day, hearing an alien being speak Tok Pisin was not among them. Meeting an alien named Word-Keeper in Tok Pisin ranked in likelihood right up there with purple cows. But there was nothing for it. Asach took the plunge.
“Mi nem Amari Selkirk Alidade Clarke Hathaway Quinn. Dispela nem Laurel Courter.”
The creepy feeling began again.
Had Asach benefited from Colchis Barthes’ find in Saint George, an ancient creature’s command of the language of servants and field hands would have been a good deal less mystifying. But operating while mystified was Quinn’s element, and Asach forged ahead, thankful for this Rosetta Stone even if its origins were at best incomprehensible, and at worst profoundly terrifying.
Asach was as aware as anyone of the perils to humanity attendant on a Motie breech of either of two blockades at Alderson points entering human space. The first and oldest, called the Crazy Eddie Point, was held by the Navy. A shift in that point the previous year had nearly allowed the fractured remains of a dozen warring Motie factions to burst through from the environs of Mote Prime. Holding it consumed most of the Navy’s resources—and placed a tremendous burden on Imperial taxpayers. That much was general knowledge.
The second jump point, called The Sister, w
as policed by an alliance of Motie traders. That alliance was cemented by their collective interest in the profits to be made through technology transfer from the Mote System to the Empire. Were the Navy’s incapacity to hold two simultaneous blockades insufficient incentive to maintain this shaky endeavor, Bury’s Imperial Autonetics legacy gave at least some humans additional venal motives for trans-species cooperation. The Sister too was under constant assault from shifting factions of the many enemies of their Motie allies.
The intrigue surrounding The Sister was not general knowledge—at least not yet. The Empire had spent the better part of three decades convincing a public scattered among a hundred worlds that humankind’s very survival depended upon keeping all Moties out of human space. The message that survival now depended on Moties policing themselves was proving difficult to spin. Regarding the Motie inheritance angle, the terms of Bury’s will were private. They were known only to Bury’s immediate family, those who had been present at the reading (including Renner and the Blaines), and an inner circle at Imperial Autonetics. The fact that Moties now held a forty-plus-percent stake in the Empire’s largest and most powerful industrial giant was not a statistic the Board wished widely known. Asach had not exactly been in touch with the latest news, let alone at the center of Imperial policy-making, during that sabbatical on Makassar.
So, in Asach’s mind, the only way that Moties could be present on New Utah was if one of the blockades had been broken. But, if that were so, where was the Motie technology? Where was the spaceport? Where were the Engineers and their Watchmaker helpers? Where were the sterile Mediators—the only caste allowed into human space? Was this—a worst-case-scenario—a new Motie farming colony? If so, the Empire’s worst fears had already been realized. The phenomenal Motie reproductive rate would soon overwhelm New Utah. How could this have happened without Imperial knowledge?
Powers of detachment served well, as several days of intensive language acquisition wore on with questions burning in the back of Asach’s mind. The old Master held the rank of Keeper-of-Words, charged with maintaining the legends associated with Sargon’s line. Lagash sifted these for human phrases. Most of these were in Middle Anglic. Asach painstakingly built a vocabulary from Tok Pisin to Anglic. They worked through numbers, nouns, actions. They called in other Masters, including the customs Accountant. They called in Doctors. They called in Miners. The young Master kept records, and had a phenomenal memory. Eventually, they exhausted the confines of the room, and Asach was allowed outside. They called in Farmers. They learned enough to carry on crude conversations. Laurel sat in stunned silence on the sidelines. Asach tried to draw her out, but received in answer only stoic tears.
Asach requested food.
“I will ask the Lord,” said Enheduanna.
Dizzy with hunger, Asach managed to send another round of bursts that night. Laurel moved like an automaton, muttering prayer.
“Wait!” called Asach, as a pinhead-sized light fluttered. “Hold it there!” This time, there was a reply:
FLASH Quinn Eyes Only.
Read attached Barthes report. Are ‘Swenson’s Apes’ Moties? Is Motie presence: New? Expanding? Threat? . Re: pre-Accession rules—prime directive applies, plausible deniability authorized. Possible translation keys attached. Advise efficacy. Barthes unblocked. Will provide him full Library data. Comms relay authorized as needed. Standing by for jump. All Due Haste. Renner.
Next came a copy of Barthes’ message with the Swenson’s Ape report, and a stream of sound files. Telemetry followed, with transmission windows and azimuths to the satellite.
Asach swore as the last of the cloak’s stored energy drained, and pondered the options. The bottom line was: Do what you can, and do what you have to, to protect the Empire. Screw pre-Accession rules if you must. Use Barthes if you can. You’re on you own until we get there. Oh yeah, thought Asach, screw it up, and we’ll swear we never knew you. Well, that was just about right. At the moment, resources included a nineteen-year-old suffering a crisis of faith, a librarian half-way across the continent, some files that would remain unreadable until daylight, and not even a pot to pee in.
‘Let’s get some sleep,” said Asach. “Big day tomorrow.”
At least this time Laurel nodded.
Blaine Institute, New Caledonia
Another team was pulling an all-nighter. They were working and reworking numbers from the nearly five-hundred-year-old Naval Initial Assessment Report, because that’s all they had to go on.
“But sir, there’s nothing there!”
“Look again.”
The Lieutenant was adamant. “It was just a standard Naval Level-1 prospecting survey. No orbital industry, no significant orbital ores, no radiation of any kind, no industry reported. Except at the known urban centers—Bonneville and Saint George. And the few known mining camps.”
“Determined how?”
“Standard auto-classification array. Two full passes, one-hundred-percent coverage, data dumped for software recognition and mapping of vegetative cover, hydrology, man-made features, and specified geology.”
“Well, run it against the new Motie data.”
“Sir, I did. Nothing. There’s just no signature indicating pre- or post-industrial development whatsoever, except for the known colonies. Hell, their atmosphere is even clean. They just plain skipped hydrocarbons. At least as fuel. If there are any. The survey identified no seeps, and they never developed any petrochemical industry. They went direct to solar at founding.”
“Then do it the old fashioned way. Put human eyes on it, and look at the ground.”
“That’s a lot of ground sir. It could take—”
“Start with these coordinates.” The team leader passed them over. Neither knew where they’d come from. Renner knew. Lord Blaine knew. They were the last transmitted location from Asach’s tracking collar. At close range, the cloak knew where the chip was. The satellite knew where the cloak was. As long as Quinn and the cloak stayed in close proximity, whenever the cloak talked to the satellite, Renner knew where Asach was.
“Pull it up.”
The lieutenant waved hands about, and New Utah appeared on-screen in a three-dimensional swirl, already rotating and zooming down so fast that contours of weather systems; continents; oceans; poles; were gone before they’d even registered. The pale blue pinprick with a surrounding scatter of pink and red fields that was the fledgling Bonneville swept past in a wink. Then they swooped over the flat, white panne of The Barrens, followed by a spooky disjoint of seeming to fly through a mountain ridge, then bursting forth over a brilliant field, now emerald; now aquamarine in the shifting light.
“Pull back, then stop.”
Even for a jaded pair of terrain analysts, the view of the brilliant river delta, slashed between ranges of scrubby mountains, was breath taking.
“Zoom in again.”
But there was nothing there, save scattered earthen mounds dotting the lustrous fields.
“Can you pull in closer?”
The lieutenant shook her head. “That’s it, sir. Ten meter’s the limit on a Level 1 Survey.”
Meaning that anything smaller than ten meters wide didn’t even appear. The major nodded. “What’s the vegetation?”
“Best guess is some kind of cyanobacteria. We’d need a full assay to be sure.”
The major nodded again. Everybody knew what that was, and it was no surprise on a world with a native oxygen atmosphere. Without blue-green “algae”—really a photosynthetic bacteria—there wouldn’t be an oxygen atmosphere. It was a primary adjunct to all terraform maintenance. The stuff grew everywhere: fresh water, salt water, inside rocks, hell, even in the coats of some animals. It formed globules, mats, filaments; partnered up with funguses to make lichens and rhizome mats; survived under ice caps, so long as light could get to it. Finding a form that grew in grass-like-stands in a river delta on a planet subject to climate extremes did not require a huge leap of evolutionary imagination.
&nb
sp; “Do we have anything else for this area? Any comparator?”
“No sir. That was the only survey. It looks like Maxroy’s Purchase only surveyed as far as their base colonies.”
The major nodded again. Survey was expensive. A full planetary survey was probably well outside the budget of a religious order.
“What about the first Jackson expedition?”
“That was a just a delegation shuttle, sir. No survey mission.”
The major nodded. “Right.” She got up to leave, then thought again. “What ship?”
“Sir?”
“What was the shuttle vessel?”
The lieutenant consulted records briefly. “Oh.” Looked again. “Private registry, sir. Imperial Autonetics. Nauvoo Vision.”
The major smiled at this. “Ah.” Smiled again. “And by any chance, lieutenant, has Nauvoo Vision filed a survey record?”
“Like I say, sir, private vessel and—oh.” The lieutenant tapped some more. “That’s odd.” More tapping. “It looks like—somebody—posted restricted files—sir that’s not a Naval cipher.”
“Uh huh. Filed when?”
“That’s what’s odd. They weren’t filed with the original commission report. They came directly from—um—” The lieutenant had the very chilling sense that this was not something it would be good to know.
“Captain Renner?”
“Yes sir. Yesterday. I’m not on original distribution, so I didn’t see them. They’re IA proprietary.” The lieutenant looked nervous.
“Relax, L-T. Bury leant the ship to the Jackson Delegation back in the day. You can’t blame Imperial Autonetics for sneaking in a bit of survey on the side. Looks like Renner dug it up for us. Open sesame,” said the major, punching an access code.
The fly-down played again. This one was more limited. It covered only the track from orbital entry to the parking spot at a geosynchronous station above Saint George. But that was all they needed. They ran the pass in reverse. During the intervening half-millennium between the reports, mountains had spilled their guts onto the plains below. Bonneville had grown from pinprick to splodge, rail lines and a highway now connecting it to Saint George; the brilliant flash of the DAZ-E field and the flat, fenced expanses of the Hopper strips and Lynx port; the endless rows of associated warehouses clearly visible. The flat, white panne of The Barrens was now punctuated by scratches of roads and tracks; crossroads and pumping stations; emerald wheels of circle irrigation. An airstrip made a creamy, scrub-bounded cross against the white glare. This time they brushed the range top, then bursting forth over—a vast expanse of gridded, lifeless grey, featureless beneath the imager’s lens. A rectangular black slash of water marked where the once-meandering delta’s estuaries had been.
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